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September 2015

Last weekend, a team of us attended Bang Goes The Borders, a regional science festival hosted by St Mary's school in Melrose.

This was the fourth year we've been there, and as usual there were around 1000 school kids and their families keen to get their hands on all kinds of science- and technology-based activities.

Although our "dinoracer" has been a big favourite for the last few years, this time we took along two completely new activities: the Supercomputing App and the Build-a-PC Junkyard Challenge - which I'd like to tell you about...

After a couple of years of measuring and trying to understand the power and energy consumption of (parallel) software and hardware, we have now released one of the key tools that we've been using as part of this research: the Adept Benchmark Suite!

While measuring performance (ie time to solution) is well understood, doing the same for power or energy is much less straightforward and often hardware dependent. The Adept Benchmark Suite relies on third party power measurement (such as instrumentation of the hardware) to be in place. However, to get users started with initial experiments, we provide a library to use RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) counters on Intel processors to measure the power of CPUs and memory, as well as some example code on how to use this library within the Adept Benchmarks.

They go by many names: “Hackathons”, “Hackdays, “Hackfests”, or my personal favourite “Code Dungeons”. Despite having heard most of these terms repeatedly over the years, I had no personal experience of them. To me, they sounded like competitive events to show off one’s skills. However, after attending Eurohack 2015 (yes, another alias) this past July, as well as a similar event organised earlier in the year by Intel, I was surprised to discover a whole new aspect of Hackathons: education and scientific advancement.

Fortissmo lowers the barriers for industrial users to access HPC-based simulation by offering the benefits of the cloud computing model (such as pay-per-use), together with support for first time users. Making HPC simulation more accessible to SMEs will increase their competitiveness - one of the key goals of the I4MS programme that supports Fortissimo.

During August and September we ran a series of seminar events across Scotland, in collaboration with three major actors in the Scottish life science sector: BioCity, BioQuarter and BioDundee.

If you weren’t lucky enough to come to one of our seminars (and the complementary lunch) on the application of HPC and Big Data in life sciences then you might want to catch up by reading the associated case study.